June 19, 2014 - Tour - Orchids

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The last stop this day was the most beautiful and the most interesting. It was the Orquideas del Ecuador.

We were told by the horticulturalist that was giving the tour that there are over 4,000 species of orchids in Ecuador, and they were working on 2,400 of them here.

He first showed us some of the seeds they were germinating. They have as much as 1,000 seeds in a small bottle. Then we went down to the large building that had even more bottles of seedlings. There was a young lady taking some of the seedlings out of the bottles and transplanting them into soil.

This greenhouse had thousands of orchids growing. We could take pictures through the window, but could not go into that part of the greenhouse. Then as we went to another area we saw these very large flowers growing from a tree. Later as we came out of the garden we were told that they were not part of the tree, but a vine that was clinging to the tree, but the branches of the vine were almost as thick as the tree's and looked like it was part of the tree.

The garden we went into was absolutely beautiful and so serene. We wished that we could have just been alone with just the sound of the fountain and the beautiful smells emanating from the orchids.

Then we went up to the showroom where they sell the orchids, but Debi declined to buy any with the comment "They will just die on me".

I know there are a lot of pictures with this post, but these orchids are so beautiful I just couldn't delete any of them.

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